In Purgatory's Shadow
by This is My Truth Tell Me Yours
Summary: A one shot about the moment Bellatrix Lestrange escaped Azkaban in 1996. She had always known the Dark Lord would return, but that was not hope. That was desperation.


**Disclaimer:** The ideas are mine, the characters belong to J.K. If Lily and Severus had been mine I would have given them a happy ending.

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" _Those who entered to investigate refused afterwards to talk of what they had found inside, but the least frightening part of it was that the place was infested with dementors._ " **Pottermore**

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It started last night, around midnight.

Bellatrix didn't know that. She didn't have a watch in her cell. In fact, there was no clock, no hourglass, no timekeeping devices whatsoever, not even a periodic bell-ringing at specific times of the day. There were meal times, she supposed, but they were not even remotely regular, and so far apart from one another that at times it seemed as though the guards neglected to feed them for days, which of course they did. Dementors would never starve the prisoners to death, of course. They could not extract energy nor thoughts from a dead body. However, they had no problem draining a weakened and famished prisoner, which meant meals were few and far in between. Also, that there was absolutely no way for Bellatrix to keep track of time at all.

It was not as though she could just look up at the sky and tell the day from the night. Azkaban was so far up north that there was barely any daylight in the winter months at all. Whatever twilight there existed was hidden behind the everlasting curtain of fog and dimness that Bellatrix had learnt to associate with Dementors. It was not the kind of place in which you could tell the time simply by looking up at the sky.

Not that she could have looked at it anyway. Azkaban was not, after all, a place for stargazing. Neither her cell, nor the hallway that led to it had any windows through which she could see the sky outside. None of the cells did.

That lack of windows was the first thing Bellatrix noticed about the prison when she was brought here for the first time, all those years ago.

She arrived on a boat. It was not possible to arrive at the island through magical means. There were no fireplaces to connect to the floo network. Portkeys could not be linked to the island and prisoners who attempted to apparate out were lethally splinched. So the new arrivals were brought in by boat. There was a small fleet of four boats that day, and hers had the lead.

Azkaban towered over her, barely visible though the mist until they were very close.

She felt a chill going down her spine.

Bellatrix, who had been the favourite of the Dark Lord, was afraid.

It was then that she noticed that the prison had no windows at all. The first thought that crossed her mind is that she would miss the night sky.

Then she took a moment to bid farewell to the stars.

Older women in her family had taught Bellatrix that the members of the House of Black looked after their descendants from the sky. She had passed on that knowledge to her younger sisters, who learnt from Bella how to recognize the patters formed by constellations in the dark. Ever since being sentenced to a life in prison, Bellatrix had drawn comfort from the fact that she would not be alone. The eyes of her fore-bearers would watch over her, and she would have generations of members of the House of Black for company. She did not know much about Azkaban. Nobody had ever told her you could not see the sky from inside.

That was not exactly surprising. Very few people had been to Azkaban in their lives, and those who visited the prison often refused to talk about what they had seen inside. Those few who did talk; Well… Windows were not the first thing on their minds.

The lack of light or ventilation; the vicious and sickly quality of the air they breathed in the high security levels; the rats that infested the place, and that unmistakable scent of rodent urine impregnated in the walls; all of that paled in comparison to the more frightening horrors of Azkaban.

Be that as it may, the thought of not being able to look at the stars made her feel quite lonely. And afraid. Perhaps she should have predicted that fear was to become he constant companion in the next few years.

The boat wasn't exactly sailing smoothly. The ocean was never quiet in that part of the world, and there were jolts and bumps on their way, courtesy of the waves. Every and again some water would splash her bare arms or face, and it was like being hit with a bucket full of ice. Twice she thought the boat might break in two.

It was after all, a small fishing boat, with oars attached to the side, barely big enough for three or four people. Two aurors squeezed themselves on the stern, and they were very quiet. An ingenuous parson who caught sight of them might have thought they were off to some sort of odd fishing trip. Unless they could see the chains of course. People leaving for fishing trips didn't usually have chains tying their ankles together.

She glanced at the aurors at the other end of that fishing boat and wondered if they were afraid. They had her wand of course, but there was two of them in that boat nonetheless, so they must be afraid of something. She had always enjoyed being respected. Being feared. It made Bella smile as another cold wave invaded the boat, soaking the lower part of her dress. The aurors had casted spells at their end of the boat, to protect themselves from the water, but Bellatrix was left in the cold.

At least she could look at the stars.

It would take her fourteen years to look at the stars again.

And it started last night.

She had no idea that fourteen years had gone by. She didn't know it was winter, or even that it was January. Sometimes she wasn't even sure she was alive. But she could feel the agitation in the air. Dementors were flying fast across the corridors, barely hovering in to drain the feelings and thoughts of the prisoners, and Bella caught herself thinking clearly for the first time in months. There was something going on.

Then there was the wind. That unmistakable gust of fresh air, forcing itself inside, reaching her putrid cubicle and making her hair flutter about. There was wind coming through the cracks in the wall! The walls were breaking. The prison was coming apart.

And then, there was the pain. Pain that burned in her forearm with the power of a thousand scorpions, making her fall to her knees and bringing to her eyes. Pain that Bellatrix welcomed as she looked down at the mark that had been getting more and more clear for the past several months. Pain like she hadn't felt in fourteen years.

He was here. The Dark Lord had returned, as she said he would all those years ago, and he had come for her. He was _here_.

Then she started shouting. The Dark Lord had returned as she had always known he would, and she shouted those things in a babyish voice she had some trouble recognizing as her own.

Then she saw the keys flying through the corridor and hovering in front of the keyholes in the cells, commandeered by some sort of spell she had never seen before. She heard the metallic click of her cell door opening as the key turned in the air and the entire building trembled. She rand downstairs in the stone steps of the staircase, pushing inmates she didn't recognize with her elbows, trying to get downstairs.

There were no dementors in the way. She was free!

She did not stop until she was outside the building, that high concrete tomb in which she'd been buried alive for the past fourteen years. And she didn't look back. She wanted to get away, to make sure that her Lord's efforts to release her had not been in vain, and she ran as though the prison doors might be closed again at any moment, as tough the dementors might be back at any second, and if only she could get to one of the boats they would let her go.

But the small vessels that had looked so much like fishing boats to her eyes were nowhere to be seen. The violence of the waves had taken them to the bottom of the sea.

Driven by her madness, Bellatrix jumped from the cliff on which the prison stood, diving, head first into the violent waters of the North Sea.

To say that those waters were cold would be an understatement.

But Bellatriz didn't mind the cold. Azkaban was always cold. There was no fireplace or heating system. The stone floor was like ice and it was that she slept with the rats. Her teeth were always chattering; her nose was always running; her body was always shivering; She was accustomed to the cold.

Bellatrix almost welcomed the numbness in her arms and legs as the water engulfed her for the first time in fourteen years. Swimming was difficult, and her soaked clothes seemed to pull her down, but Bellatrix kept going. Her muscles ached. Whenever her head emerged for air and she took a breath, everything burned. Breathing actually hurt.

She went on swimming.

She didn't stop when she felt the carcasses of dead rats that had been floating on the water coming towards her. She didn't stop when thurders roared across the sky, or when she saw another one of the prisioners drowning. She just kept going.

And it was only when she was sure that she couldn't take another stroke that Bellatrix found a rock, haped somewhat like an anvil, and held on to it, to stop the sea from taking her away.

The freezing temperatures of the water had numbed her limbs to the point where she could barely moved, and yet the woman, whose youth had been lost to that forsaken place, struggled to keep herself afloat.

Emerging from the water, only to find herself caught in the middle of a violent windstorm, Bella discovered that the wind hurt her face. Leaves and stones hit her, but it was the wind that felt like a thousand needles on her wet skin. She could no longer feel her lips or the tips of her fingers, but she held on to that anvil-shaped rock and tried as best as she could to pull herself upwards.

A particularly violent wave hit her, and the witch lost her balance, cutting her arm on the stones. Her warm blood dyed the ocean red.

Screaming in pain, the wind throwing her hair over her eyes, Bella managed to pull half her body from the water, and her bare arms encountered the mercilessness of those winds. She remained like that for a while, trying not to breath to avoid the burning pains whenever the winter air invaded her lungs. The drops of water on her eyelids seemed to have frozen.

With difficulty, Bella managed to pull herself over to the rock, dragging the legs that she could no longer feel along with her. Her whole body shivered in a type of cold so bitter she had never experienced before. It took her a moment to realize that there was water and ice falling from the sky.

But the Dementors were going away. There being released, she realised, free to find their victims elsewhere, and the sky was getting clearer. As the fog dissipated, the amethyst colour of the polar twilight could be seen.

It was beautiful. Just a few hours ago, when she had been in that cell, she had lost all hope of ever seeing something beautiful again. Hope was a dangerous thing to have in a place like Azkaban. Hope was the first thing to go away. The Dementors took care of that.

Oh, she still screamed in that babyish voice of hers from behind those bars, she shouted truths about the return of the Dark Lord at the dementors and whoever else happened to be around. But that wasn't hope. That was desperation.

Slowly Bella tried to pull herself up, to stand on her rock, and she fell a couple of times, losing her balance on account of the waves that licked her ankles much like the windstorm kissed her entire body. When she finally managed to stand up she looked back at the prison, towering over her and piercing that amethyst sky as Dementor after Dementor flew through the cracks on the walls into the vastness of the sky. Large pieces of rock fell from the walls of the prison on the tombstones of the disgraced sould who had been buried there. And Bella smiled, a maddened smile, bourn from the realization that her bones would never lie on that island. She was never coming back.

Bellatrix lifted her trembling arms into the air and screamed, rambling unintelligible things in that babyish voice of hers, torn between sobbing and laughter whe she saw the Dark Mark in the sky.

Then she fell on her knees and cried like a baby, surrendering to the shivering, the numbness the cold and the bitterness of the winter wind. The Dark Lord would take her home.

She was free.

 _ **Author's note:** I wrote this for the ultimate battle competition ( Khione's Ice Crown) and the Printerest Picture Prompt Challenge (person prompt 11)._

 _Also for the Greek Mythology Mega Challenge (Hermes: Write about somewhere other than Great Britain) and the Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft and Wizardry Competition! (Transfiguration/ Year One)_

 _I had to write this fast, but it was a good idea and I didn't want to lose it. It is very possible that this will be rewritten or at least slightly changed._


End file.
